1. Technical Field
The present invention has application to the field of music and to the sub fields of electrical musical tone generation using transducers and electromagnetic fields and with particular application to stringed and percussion instruments.
2. Background Art
Since Thomas Edison first used a vibrating thorn to cut a sound track in a revolving wax cylinder producing a very rough and poor quality sound by contemporary standards, many scientists, inventors and experimenters have striven for perfect reproduction and recording of sound and music, using devices referred to as “pickups” to detect and attempt to reproduce sound produced by musical instruments.
The imperfections and limitations of current electrical pickups have generated a vast multitude of variations and combinations of pickup types with a sole goal of achieving perfect electrical reproduction of sound.
The reproduced sound from many musical instruments relies upon a pickup conversion process to convert mechanical musical vibrations into an electrical signal that can be amplified and recorded.
Types of Conventional Pickups Include:
a) a magnetic pickup which includes an inductive coil surrounding a permanent magnet;
b) a piezoelectric pickup which includes vibration sensitive crystalline material;
c) an acoustic pickup which includes a microphone with a vibration sensitive diaphragm;
d) an optical pickup which includes a light source and a phototransistor detector;
e) and combinations of above types of pickups.
General Problems with Background Art:
a) conventional pickup systems rely on intermediary mediums to transfer a primary mechanical musical vibration to a pickup's electrical signal generating components;
b) the conventional pickup can load a primary mechanical musical vibrating element and distort true pitch and intonation of the element and reduce sustain and limit amplitude and frequency response of a resulting electrical signal.
Specific Problems with Background Art Including:
a) magnetic pickup needs steel strings to vibrate in a magnetic field with a large inductive coil to pick up audio frequency vibrations consequently loading a vibrating string and reducing a resulting frequency response;
b) a piezoelectric pickup needs a vibrating component including at least one of a bridge and a soundboard, often leading to a poor low frequency response;
c) an acoustic microphone relies upon variations in air pressure to transfer a musical vibration and is subject to an external noise and frequency response limitation;
d) an optical pickup requires a light source and detector to be above and below each of an instrument's strings without affecting operation of an instrument, the optical pickup is receptive to displacement of a string's shadow in one dimension only, and accordingly, information pertaining to sound received by an optical pickup is limited as a string vibrates in three dimensions, as a result sound reproduction is limited in quality and physical requirements limit the optical pickup's application to a bridge area of the instrument.